Sunday, November 22, 2009

Just popping in to share an awesome, funny nugget of info about the new Blu-Ray of Fight Club from CHUD writer Alex Riviello:

In possibly the best home video prank since the Elite Night of theLiving Dead disc started up with a scratched-up print and out of sync musicbefore revealing the beautiful new restoration, the new Fight ClubBlu-Ray doesn't even start up with the movie at all. Pop the disc in yourblu-ray player and this is the menu that will pop up-

Terrifying, no? Especially for the guys who absolutely don't get the filmand somehow see it as machismo fantasy- it's going to ruin their day. Of course,after a few seconds the menu disappears and the real one pops up. Kudos to DavidFincher for messing with his fans like that. Drew Barrymore apparently gave theok to her good pal Edward Norton for the joke, and Fox implored reviewers not toreveal it before release this Tuesday.

I can't really think of a better prank for someone to pull. I think a know a few guys who would throw the Blu-Ray player out the window when they saw that. Nice one, Fincher.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

OK, first let me just say Happy Belated Halloween! There wasn't much going on that evening with friends, but I did get to take my little cousins trick or treating, and I got to carve this sucker right here:

Those smaller pumpkins sure are hungry.

I thank Tom Nardone of Extreme Pumpkins.com for this idea. I bought the second book of his, and wow, those ideas are pretty elaborate. I might save that Godzilla pumpkin for next year. Whatever you guys did, I hope it was fun!

Unfortunately, Halloween's long over now, but at least it's almost time to step into the holiday season coming up. I'll be talking about Disney's latest Christmas box office offering soon, but first I want to talk about Kenny Ortega's MJ documentary This Is It, which as you all know was only out for two weeks.

To be honest, there's not much that I have to say about this movie. As a documentary, there really isn't a whole lot of behind the scenes stuff going on, or a lot of interview time. A lot of time seems to be spent on showing off the performances and musical numbers that would have made it into the concert. I gotta say I understand it though. I mean, there's not much about MJ's life that the public doesn't already know about.

Speaking of MJ, you could barely tell there was anything wrong with the guy. If anything, he looked better than he did throughout this entire decade so far, and his dancing was still pretty good. He seemed to leave a lot of it up to the backup dancers, but nevertheless, he still seemed to have a ton of energy. Even though I probably wouldn't have been able to afford tickets for it, the show certainly looked like it was going to be amazing. There was a lot of flashiness and excess that some might have deemed unnecessary, but for a guy that had as big a public persona as Jackson, you almost expect that kind of thing.

To sum it up, I would have liked to hear a few more thoughts from the other performers involved, but I did like the musical numbers. "The Way You Make Me Feel" looked especially cool.

Again, there's not a whole lot to say. I'm not gonna lie, I found the film to be pretty unremarkable.

I couldn't really see Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge, at least not the way I saw Patrick Stewart or Alastair Sim in the role. Throughout the film, I still wasn't able to see him in it. He had the mannerisms down, to be sure, but the voice acting still sounded very much like Jim Carrey pretending to be an old Englishman. In other words, he was over acting yet again. What makes that worse is that none of the other voice actors in the film really stand out. I figured at least Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit would be somewhat memorable, but it just seemed like such a standard, by-the-numbers performance, and the same can be said for all the other roles in the film as well.

The CGI also kind of bugged me. The textures weren't Pixar-level good, but I guess they were good enough, and I do like how they help to enhance the creepiness of the ghosts. Some parts though, especially the part with the Ghost of Christmas Past, just look like a video game cutscene. All the pointless pop scares and stuff also made it seem very gimmicky too, which doesn't help the reputation of 3D movies much, although maybe that's just a side effect of seeing it in IMAX. At least the uncanny valley isn't quite a huge factor in this film like it was in The Polar Express.

As an adaptation, this film is okay. It includes a lot of passages from the book that a lot of the other adaptations of this story don't but it didn't really do anything new with the story aside from all the gimmicky 3D stuff, which was kind of a letdown. Granted, the trailers for this film didn't give us much anyway, but the 3D aspect could have been utilized to give us so much more.

I wish they had not focused so much on making this a wacky family film, but I guess everyone saw that coming a mile away anyway, so I'm not sure anyone else will mind.

On one last note, I want to apologize for not getting to see Where The Wild Things Areor A Serious Man. I heard good things about both, but I just didn't have the time, and with me getting a job in retail and Black Friday on the horizon, it's probably going to be even more difficult to find time to get to the theater.